


The Never Ever Gonna Put These Up Again Fics (The One Who Sees and Walking With Heroes)

by MetaCat (OtherCat)



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Author Agrees With Sporker, Author Commentary, Because this is not actually academia, Depression, Domestic, Lindsey as a Seer, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Meta, Random FanGirling of Pro Author, Random shifts from third to first person, Romance, Self-Sporking, Sporking - Freeform, Writing, You At Least Identified The Genre, You Compared a Romance to a Romance, good job, xander as a watcher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 21:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10930800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OtherCat/pseuds/MetaCat
Summary: A short and extremely belated essay concerning the complete disappearance of a RP fic I co-wrote with a friend.





	The Never Ever Gonna Put These Up Again Fics (The One Who Sees and Walking With Heroes)

_The One Who Sees_ was a Lindsey Xander fic that started mostly as a RP between myself and Kdorian. It posted on my old Livejournal from March 21 2004 to August 31 2004 and we were working on a sequel up until I completely drifted from the _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ fandom. There are some confusing in jokes that can only be adequately explained if you’re familiar with the works of Spider Robinson, there are some disturbing incidents that make me wince a bit after the fact. There are aspects of the plot line and characterization that I thought were adequately explained, but were not actually adequately explained at all, according to a very detailed sporking the fic received. Though Kdorian is a superlative beta/first reader under most circumstances, she was not able to fix all or most of the problems in the story because I kept putting new ones in. This is an overview of the fic, commentary on where it went wrong, the sequel, the attempt to get it betaed, the unacknowledged third author (namely my anxiety) and why I have negative interest in posting it.

**The Basic Plot**

The story features Xander, who is currently acting as a Watcher for two Slayers. He also ends up taking care of Lindsey McDonald who has acquired the Seer ability. Lindsey is in a state where he is self-medicating and severely depressed. Xander is in a state where he feels sorry for the guy but feels uncomfortable about the drinking because Issues. They slowly develop a relationship and adventures happen.

Side Plot One: an entity that identifies strongly with both Xander and Lindsey takes the general shape/concept of “Hyena Xander” and ends up becoming Lindsey’s companion/familiar.

Side Plot Two: Ghost! Doyle attempts to help Lindsey with his issues. He has boxes and boxes of issues and OtherCat indulges in her love of surreal dreamwalking and internal symbolism.  BECAUSE SHE LIKE SURREAL DREAMWALKS OKAY.

The sequel Walking With Heroes was more of the same, except there were some plot developments I wasn’t happy with. And also I was drifting from the fandom and I had negative interest in continuing the story.

**The Third Author**

The saying “everyone is their own worst critique” is never more apt when you are dealing with untreated anxiety/depression/a learning disability that is making the first two much worse. _The One Who Sees_ was the first long fic I was ever able to complete, mostly because Kdorian was able to keep me engaged and focused on the story. She was also a big help with the plotting, the prose and the dialog. (No surprise since this was a RP after all.) I learned a lot about writing and was able to bull through the moments when I was convinced that everything was terrible and nothing worked. (Which were very, very frequent.) 

The third author is/was a complete dick, and is a large part of the reason why I took the fic down and have no intention of putting it back up. (It is on my dreamwidth, and I even took it off private/friendlocked mode.) The third author is not happy with the completed fic and agrees wholeheartedly with the sporking the fic received on an LJ community devoted to sporking long fics that are terrible. (I somewhat agree with the sporking except where the sporker was dead wrong or failed to understand the text/context of what was going on within the story. Also they compared the fic to a “Mills and Boone” novel which is apparently a Great and Terrible Insult. Since Mills and Boone might also be compared to Harlequin romances and some romance novelists make a huge amount of money I am no longer sure it is a Great and Terrible Insult.) Anxiety Brain does not handle things well, and the Communication Skills or Ability to Deal With Anything factors decrease the more anxious and depressed I become, and the end result is that I have as much anxiety for the fic as I do pride for the fic.

**I Swear To God We Had Blue Prints and Everything (Research and How We Failed to Get the Damn Research Across)**

**The House:**

The concept model was a two story three bedroom house from the 1970s, though we were using a more modern blue print. One bathroom, which a beta later said was Totally Illegal For the Room Number. (No, no it isn’t. I have lived in houses with three or more bedrooms that only had one bathroom. I solemnly swear it is possible to live in a house with one bathroom and multiple teenagers, even teen girls. I grew up with that kind of floor plan. That said, we still should have had one of the ongoing remodels during the fic be an additional bathroom.)

Another point that may have been missed not emphasized enough is that Xander is in the process of rebuilding/modifying the house while also living in it and taking care of his Slayers (with the occasional help of others.) The curtain fic aspects were a feature, not a bug, in other words. The authors have/had a competence kink approximately the size of Jupiter, and there is nothing more adorable than a capable tradesman who is also acting as a semi-mentor/parental figure for a pair of demon hunters. We see no reason why we can’t have both curtain fic and adventure fic in the same fic. If Nina Kiriki Hoffman can do it, so can we. (Okay technically she’s more horror/domestic and fantasy/domestic not adventure, but I am sure if she wrote low or high adventure-forward stories, Our Heroes would have complicated family lives and become entangled in them while visiting relatives with varying levels of willingness. And it would be Awesome.)

**Mental Health Issues (The Characters):**

**Lindsey Was Never Supposed to be An Alcoholic:**

Okay so, Lindsey suddenly has the Seer Visions that are a Guaranteed Death Sentence. He responds to his impending death the way someone who is not actually recovering from a mental break down followed by depression (also as a result of Seer Visions) might by self-medicating. Once he’s diagnosed and realizes and _understands_ he has depression and gets started on meds, he stops drinking, not because he’s a goody two shoes suddenly but because the meds he’s on _shouldn’t be taken if you’re also drinking alcohol._ This apparently did not come through very well much to the eternal exasperation of at least one of the others. (Me. It’s definitely me who is eternally exasperated about this. Neither of the authors are named Carrie Freaking Nation.)    

**Xander Has Issues About Drunk and Disorderly Behavior Also He Doesn’t Know Lindsey That Well Yet:**

Xander does not initially trust Lindsey and finds Lindey’s behavior both sympathetic/pitiful and upsetting. He is initially a dick about the self-medicating but realizes that he is being a dick, and backs off. Or at least that’s what we were trying to write it as. He gradually becomes more trusting of Lindsey during the course of the fic. He also becomes attracted to Lindsey and doesn’t quite know how to deal with it. (Lindsey is likewise having problems dealing with the situation.)

**The Sporking:**

The sporking was what initially gave me the impetus to take the fic and the sequel down. It was compared to a Mills and Boone novel, the romance was too mushy and stereotypical, and the alcoholism was cured by love. I don’t remember but I think there might have been some accusations of uke/seme tropes. (I have strong negative feelings about uke/seme, so I was utterly horrified.) So on and so forth. I did not disagree with most of the sporking, but Anxiety Brain took over and decided that it Could Not Bear To Have This Up Any Longer. Because Anxiety Brain. The few commenters that agreed with the sporking could not outweigh the people who supported and enjoyed the story, because Anxiety Brain prefers to listen to and believe negative or hostile feedback versus positive, helpful feedback. (I am not linking to the sporking because it was on Livejournal and I am not linking to Livejournal.)

 **Note:** I am not accusing the sporker of hurting my widdle feewings. I am saying that I agreed with the sporking, but Anxiety Brain was particularly vehement about it. Because anxiety brain. Also, let me define “helpful” feedback as being “correction of grammar or typographical errors, notes about characterization, detailed critique that follows the general “sandwich format” of two positive notes between the actual criticism and not being a dick, noting formatting errors. Negative or hostile feedback is generally not very helpful, and sporking is by definition unhelpful. Often very funny if it’s not you being sporked, but not helpful.

**Spider Robinson:**

We make a vague reference to one of Spider Robinson’s stories. Specifically “God is an Iron,” which if I recall correctly contains the phrase, “if a felon commits a felony, God is an iron.” (In other words, he commits irony.) Sensible souls would have realized “no one is going to get this, best cut it out,” but we were not sensible souls.

**Attempts to Beta/Proofread/Turn the Fic Over to Co-Author:**

I initially turned the story over to Kdorian after I calmed down from Anxiety Brain. I made the occasional attempt to fix the typos and grammatical errors but nothing came of it. At one point I managed to become enthused enough to acquire betas but my interest fizzled again, after I finished the first chapter of the completely rewritten and betaed _The One Who Sees_. (I tried, I really tried and actually wanted to at one point, but I did not have an adequate amount of “Can.” I was completely without “Can.”

For a long while, I had the original fics on private mode, but I recently took them off. I am still probably never going to try re-writing the story, or working on it. I’m glad that I wrote the fic and it really helped me work on my writing style and other aspects of the writing craft, and it was the first long fic I could point to and go “I finished it. I didn’t get depressed or distracted and I completed the damn thing.”

The morbidly curious can find _The One Who Sees_ and other BTVS fics in my dreamwidth [Memories](http://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/memories?user=othercat&keyword=BTVS/ATS+fic&filter=all).

**Author's Note:**

> Note: [Carrie Nation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation) was a very radical member of the temperence movement.


End file.
